Lawsuit Dropped; Claimed That Copyright-Filtering Violates Copyright

Lawyers have abandoned a closely watched lawsuit against the document-sharing site Scribd that alleged the site’s copyright filtering technology is itself a form of copyright infringement.

The Texas federal court case broached a novel legal theory that the U.S. courts have never squarely decided.

The Scribd suit maintained that the copying and insertion of a copyrighted work into a filtering system without compensating the copyright holder, or obtaining their consent, was a violation of the Copyright Act. The suit said the filters breached copyrights because Scribd “illegally copies the work into its copyright protection system” without authorization.

Filtering systems generally compare new uploads to a database of copyrighted works, or a mathematical hash of those works, in order to filter out infringing documents. Copyright filtering technology has quickly become a behind-the-scenes feature on university sites, user-generated content sites and online social networking venues. Viacom’s $1 billion infringement case against YouTube did not allege violations after 2007, when Google-owned YouTube deployed filtering technology.

Scribd, of San Francisco, provides a website with storage, searching and retrieval of documents.

The dropped case (.pdf), which sought class action status, was filed last September by children’s writer Elaine Scott, whose 1985 Stocks and Bonds was found on Scribd.

Ironically, Scott targeted Scribd both for trying to block pirated copies of her book, and for failing to successfully do so. An infringing copy of Stocks and Bonds was downloaded from Scribd about 100 times before she sent the company a DMCA takedown notice.

Brian Mendonca, Scribd’s attorney, said the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provided Scribd safe-harbor protection from Scott’s claim because, as an internet service provider, it removed the work in question after receiving a takedown notice. What’s more, he said, Scribd had a right of fair use to employ Scott’s words in its filters, which are designed to prevent infringement.

“They realized that Scribd had a very strong protection under the law,” Mendonca said of Scott’s lawyers, who did not immediately return phone messages seeking comment.

One of Scott’s lawyers, Kiwi Camara, defended Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who was the nation’s first individual file sharing defendant to go to trial against the Recording Industry Association of America. Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay thousands of dollars in damages.